


Her Brother

by TheMightyZan



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-27
Updated: 2014-12-27
Packaged: 2018-03-03 19:55:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2885549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheMightyZan/pseuds/TheMightyZan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hawke remembers her brother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Her Brother

She loved her brother.

She remembered when he and Bethany had been born, and how she had cried because they wouldn’t let her hold him. She had been so excited about having a brother. The boys in the village were always poking fun at her or refusing to let her go with them to play or fish, and now she had her own younger one to take to do all those things.

Reality very rarely lived up to dreams though.

Oh, they fished and played, and often times pulled pranks on others in the village, but Carver had always chaffed at being younger, smaller, weaker.

He had grown into himself, yes, but he had also grown into his unhappiness. He constantly felt he needed to prove himself, constantly felt he needed to do one better. If she used a sword, he needed to use a bigger one, if she did well in school he needed to do better.

He had once told her, right after their father had died and they had gotten maudlin on a bottle of whiskey, that he felt like he was living in her shadow. She hadn’t known how to respond. She had never meant to make him feel that way, had never wanted him to think that she was keeping him down.

She had only ever wanted to be his friend.

When she had said as much he had waved it away and relented enough to tell her that he didn’t hate her, didn’t want her gone, and that he would always support her the way she had always tried to support him. It hadn’t really changed anything between them, but at least they both understood each other a little better, and when she signed up to join the King’s forces at Ostagar he had joined her, laughingly stating that someone had to watch her back.

He had seemed to come into his own in the few short weeks they were there. He found a place among the others, and had a chance to show what he could do away from the people he had known his whole life and the stigma of being the “younger Hawke”.

And if she downplayed her own ability to help it happen, well, she wasn’t hurting anyone.

She had had so much hope for him after seeing him with the other soldiers, but then Loghain had betrayed them all, and everything had been lost.

They had made it home, found their mother and sister, and set off to try and find a new life.

Unfortunately, it hadn’t worked. It hadn’t worked, and now her brother lay dead and buried in the burning ground of Fereldan while his family took ship to Kirkwall.

He had only been 18.

He was never going to get to find his glory, never get to settle down with a pretty wife and have babies that he could tell his war stories to, he was never going to know what it was like to grow old and content with the life he had lead.

She loved her brother, every annoying, spiky, complaining part of him, and she was never going to see him again.

She put her head into her hands and, for the first time since before the Blight had ever started, wept.


End file.
